Typophile

What font were Pete Townsend's (The Who) guitars numbered with?

DTK_LAMF

This is a somewhat absurdly OCD question, but I figure I've come to the right place to ask about fonts; I initially posed this question in a guitar forum & got nowhere:
Beginning in '74, Pete Townsend of The Who numbered his Les Pauls (guitars) 1-9 for different tunings etc. Between songs he would take them off & literally throw the guitar to a roadie- I remember being very impressed by all this business with the numbered guitars when I saw them in the mid-'70s. What font was he (or his guitar tech) using?
See here as I can't seem to get the img tag to work:
http://www.feelnumb.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/76_ptbackstage-tuning1.jpg
I was thinking about putting a number on a Les Paul I just got, but can't find the right font among the bazillions on my Mac or with an online search.
It's very close to the London Underground font aka P22 Johnston in bold variants, but the "8" among others is off.
Can anyone tell me the right font?
One clue would be whatever fonts were available in Presstype rub-on lettering in 1974 (or, more likely, some UK equivalent I've never heard of), as I'd bet that was what was used to number the guitars.
Many thanx for any help.

Craig Eliason

Somewhat similar: English Grotesque. Maybe whatever font Rian Hughes was inspired by in putting that together is your mystery font.

Hrant H Papazian

There's a Typophiler for that.™
http://typophile.com/blog/2127

hhp

DTK_LAMF

Thanks for the replies; the guitar guys came through with the fact (from a/the Who site) that they are Letraset numbers (so I was right about a UK equivalent of Presstype, although one I used a lot in the '70s, but had forgotten- this probably explains the maddening familiarity of the font).
Letraset's closest current font is Charlotte Book Sans, which is close but no cigar, perhaps because the site says it was done in 1992 & thus unlikely to have been very available in 1974.
eliason: yes, very close & likely you are correct that the designer is "biting" (as we used to say when we did calligraphy on the MTA) what I'm looking for (as is the current Letraset font, which in any case doesn't come in the white 5" high numerals needed).
One of the guitar guys blew up a pic of one of Townsend's guitars to lifesize & traced the number to make one for his guitar, so you can see I'm not [entirely] alone in my OCD-ness.,

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